After spending weeks searching the Flexera and SAP community forums and going round and round because all the links are circular, someone recently posted an answer on an old thread from 2010 and 2012, and it works. Here is the link: http://scn.sap.com/thread/1860179 Scroll down through all the old wrong and inconclusive answers and find Anders Gustafsson's comments. Rather than leave it at that, like so many posters in these forums do--which become useless when a page is taken down, here is what worked for me based on Anders' post. 1. Use the most recent Crystal Reports for VS, whatever that may be. (And check frequently, because they try to change them quarterly.) 2. Unpack the same version MSM file into the C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Merge Modules folder. Putting the most recent in InstallShield Projects\Merge Modules without updating the other will merge an earlier version if one exists in the first path. 3. You will read in all of these circular threads that you need to install the C++ 2005 redistributable -- but until Anders' and another person's post in the past few days, it was unclear which one. The plain C++ 2005 redistributable does not work, and there are about a dozen others. The one that does work is: Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package ATL Security Update 4. Anders also pointed out that Crystal Reports depends on ATL. I did a dynamic scan with Installshield and it showed ATL.3xxx, so I added that in the redistributables (not the higher versions). 5. These two changes finally cracked the persistent error 1904 problem on a Win 8.1 machine. (The installation had been fine on Win 7 machines for some reason.) I guess a caution is that if you are getting this error and reading this three years from now when CR dribbles out a new buggy version (like 13_0_11, which was recently replaced by _12), it may no longer have been built on C++ 2005, but a later version, and your ATL version may be later also, but hopefully this will help. Happy computing, Charlie ... View more